Wednesday, 5 November 2014

Live And Let Live. Grow and Let Grow. Something About Kissing.

Oh fuck me, I’ve
come over all ranty again.

It’s Movember: the
time of year when – first and foremost – the campaign to raise awareness of prostate/testicular
cancer1 gets its biggest slice of the attention-pie all year. That
is, after all, what Movember is for, and I hope that actual fundraising takes
place, besides all the moustache baby-steps and hirsute guffaws. I’m all for
it. Anything that makes a difference; bonds men together; makes people happy
and adds fur to faces – those are all boxes to be ticked in my opinion (woo –
there’s that word again, Mu’s favourite). After all, I am heavily involved in
the Bearding Community and I have seen first-hand the good that Beard Clubs do,
not just in raising funds for charities but right down on a personal level.
Beards Help Their Brothers.

Some lovely Bearded Gentlemen. The Wessex Beardsmen, in fact.

Naturally, SocMed
fills up with the usual memes relating to moustache growth; beards; shaving;
not shaving; the superior ability of the one faction to ‘get pussy’ compared to
the propensity for the other faction to actually have one, or be one, or
something equally droll. These are met with laughter and/or derision, depending
on the point of view – nay, the OPINION – of the other users.

A new one this year
was along the lines of (um), “She Says She’s Doing No-Shave November – She Better
Get Ready For No-‘D’ December”. I’m not posting the meme here, for fuck’s sake,
you’ve seen it enough times. I gather the implications are

·that the Girlfriend
of the Male in question is planning to stop shaving one or more body areas from
which she is habitually inclined to undertake hair removal;

·the Male is repulsed
by the prospect of the Girlfriend acquiring a month’s worth of hair growth in
said areas;

·the Male proposes,
presumably as an intended punishment, withholding sexual intercourse (the “D”,
if you will) for the month following

It is unclear
whether the Male intends to continue engaging in intimate acts with the
Girlfriend during the month of November, nor is it clear whether the Girlfriend
will revert to her usual state of depilatory satisfaction in time for the
apparent penance of ‘No-D December’.

I am struggling with
the logic here. Surely the Male will punish himself twice:

- firstly, by forcing himself to have to commit
acts which, though normally pleasurable, will disgust him (but not her,
presumably) because he is having to do them with a lady of a very slightly more
hirsute appearance during November;

- then, for the month following, by which time
the Girlfriend has become smooth and therefore, to him, desirable once more, by
declining to engage in said acts despite the offending follicles being made
bare of their growth in accordance with his preference?

Entirely gratuitous Jimmy Niggles shot. What? My blog...

Now, I know what you’re
thinking. Mu, you’re thinking, Stop over-thinking it. It’s just a meme, and not
a very good one at that. Well! Clearly I am not the only one to over-think
things. ‘Swhat the Internets is for! This meme appeared in a ‘Closed’ Facebook
group where, it must be said, nearly2 all of the members are of
sound mind and sense of humour: warm, kind, tolerant, and always happy to laugh
at the ridiculous. The passion which unites us is for The Beard, and we don’t
seem to care whether it’s on a man or a lady: all are welcomed with love and
respect. It’s great.

However, this meme
proved divisive. Debates began. Insults were thrown. True colours showed. Members
left. Others laughed. I won’t repeat any of it – it’s all filed under YHTBT3.
But it got me thinking about Feminism. Again, not a debate I plan to open, but
I will say this: it is possible to be a Feminist and still shave your legs. Not
every woman – not every Feminist – sees hair removal as a symptom of male
oppression. If you are happy with
your reasons for shaving – or for not shaving – great. That’s all you need. I
don’t care if your reason is ‘Because my boyfriend prefers it’: if that’s your
choice, that’s fine with me.Why does it
even need to be ‘fine with me’? See previous blogs where OPINIONS are
concerned! Stop reading! You don’t need to care what I think! I barely give a
fuck myself! There are bigger issues to be tackled by the Feminist movement
than the choice of body hair removal. But to the men who buy into this ‘No-D
December’ nonsense4, ask yourselves a couple of questions:

·Do you think women’s
body hair is gross because your friends say so?

·Or because you watch
a lot of porn?

Photo: Nash. Meme: Me.

·Or are you so ungrateful
that the woman who lies down beside you actually desires you (whatever state
you may be in) that you can’t look past a bit of leg stubble or even a hairy
armpit?

If your answer is
yes to any of these, seriously, grow the fuck up. Grow the fuck up. Body hair
is unimportant. What we do with it is unimportant. Don’t use it as a tool for
oppression, a symbol of liberation, don’t use it as anything. Shave it; don’t
shave it; do with it as it pleases you. Respect the right of others to do with
theirs as it pleases them5.

You know, though… I
got to thinking. Again. If I were a man, yeah,

and I was having sex
with a lady, yeah,

and I found she had
hairy armpits, yeah,

that would be kind
of cool. It would be like finding a little mini-beard in a place I wasn’t
expecting.

A mini-beard! Amazing!

Women are beautiful.
Men are beautiful.

Do you know what’s
really amazing? Kissing. There should be more kissing. There just should.